Tapped: The Prospect Group Blog

International students vote with their feet. For the first time in more than a decade, university admissions officials reported a decrease in the number of applications to graduate school programs from international students, according to a recent Council of Graduate Schools study. Researchers found that international graduate applications declined by 3 percent and first-time enrollments declined by 1 percent from the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2017.

The study singled out new immigration policies, such as Trump’s eight-country travel ban, as a major factor discouraging international students from studying in the United States. “The graduate education community remains concerned that the ban—in its substance and rhetoric—might have hampered the global competitiveness of the United States and its ability to attract the best and brightest prospective international graduate students,” researchers found.

The sharpest decreases occurred among Middle Eastern and North African students: In the fall of 2017, applications from those countries declined 17 percent. University officials also saw an 18 percent decrease in applications from Iranian students (first-time enrollment decreased by 16 percent). Applications from Saudi Arabian students also decreased by 21 percent, but Saudi students accepted offers to study in the United States at a significantly higher rate than Iranian students (40 percent compared with 17 percent), suggesting that Trump’s travel ban and his harsh rhetoric toward Iran may have alienated Iranian students. Applications from Canadian, Chinese, Indian, and Mexican students applying to American graduate programs also declined.

The only increase in applications came from European students (up by 18 percent) and students from sub-Saharan African countries (up by 12 percent).

It was just a few months ago that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker unveiled a massive deal that would give the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn $3 billion in tax subsidies to open a $10 billion LCD TV factory, promising to bring 13,000 jobs to southeastern Wisconsin.

That’s a public cost of $230,000 per job. Initial estimates found that the state wouldn’t break even on its investment until 2043. On top of the massive tax subsidies, Foxconn will benefit from a host of other goodies—lower electricity rates, state funding for road construction and worker training, exemptions from certain environmental regulations, and unprecedented special treatment in the state court systems.

In short, Walker handed a foreign corporation the keys to the government.

Now, with another major manufacturer threatening to cut hundreds of jobs in Wisconsin, Walker is doubling down on his corporate welfare program. Following the passage of the GOP tax cut, Kimberly-Clark (the company that makes Kleenex, Huggies diapers, and Cottonelle toilet paper) announced in January that it would deliver a dividend increase for its shareholders and a $2.3 billion share buyback. The company said it would then use the remainder of its tax cut savings to restructure its operations.

That apparently means cutting 5,000 jobs in the United States, including 600 positions from its operations in northeastern Wisconsin. The company turned a $3.3 billion profit in 2017.

In a last-ditch effort to save those jobs, Walker is falling back on his Foxconn playbook. On Monday, he proposed legislation that would give Kimberly-Clark the same deal as Foxconn: 17 percent tax credits on qualifying wages at the company’s two plants.

To keep 600 jobs here in Wisconsin, I asked the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation to offer Kimberly Clark the same deal for jobs as Foxconn. @WEDCNews

As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel points out, Wisconsin taxpayers would be on the hook for $8,500 in Kimberly-Clark tax credits for one $50,000 salaried job.

Walker is running for re-election in 2018 and he’s faced scrutiny over his failure to make good on a 2010 campaign promise to create 250,000 jobs in the state. He’s not only failed to meet that mark by nearly 65,000 jobs, but Wisconsin’s manufacturing industry has continued to wither away.

The conservative governor has failed to entice businesses to set up shop with his policies of union busting and deep budget cuts to everything from the public university system to infrastructure.

As Walker has attacked public welfare programs (he’s pushed for drug-testing requirements for state welfare recipients and work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries), he’s unabashedly set up a generous corporate welfare program that flies in the face of the GOP’s purported vision of free-market capitalism.

After privatizing the state economic development agency in 2011, Walker has lavished companies with lucrative tax subsidies. In return, companies like Ashley Furniture have announced layoffs, offshored operations, or simply failed to meet job-creation promises.

The Foxconn deal may be the biggest, but, as Walker has shown, it will be far from the last. The governor has now invited any Wisconsin company to threaten to uproot unless it gets a sweet new tax subsidy.

A proposed Department of Labor rule would allow employers to pocket their employees’ tips. The proposed rule in no way requires that these pocketed tips are distributed among employees—employers could simply take them (a fact the DOL tried hard to cover up). The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the rule would cause workers to lose $5.8 billion in tips per year. While being rightfully outraged by this prospect, we should revisit why tipping exists in the United States in the first place.

In the late 1800s, wealthy Americans brought home from aristocratic Europe the bourgeois practice of tipping, meaning to impress by providing inferior laborers with spare change. And many employers were delighted at being able to hire formerly enslaved African Americans and pay them nothing, making them rely solely on tips.

Yet Americans were angered by tipping, claiming that it was anti-democratic and would only contribute to classism. A union-led movement against tipping in the early 1900s saw six states ban tipping altogether.

But as we know, that movement fell apart in the United States (though not in Europe), and tipping is now an ingrained standard in American society. And just as its racist and classist history would predict: Black workers receive less in tips than their white counterparts, sexism plays a role in who receives the highest tips, and nearly one-fifth of tipped workers in states that ascribe to the federal minimum tipped wage live in poverty.

Calls for a higher minimum wage don’t often include the tipped wage, which has stubbornly remained at $2.13 since the 1990s. Sure, restaurants are required to ensure that tipped employees receive at least the federal minimum wage, but that doesn’t always happen. And sure, many employees prefer receiving tips because there’s the chance they could make many times more than the minimum wage—but that is by no means typical for the average tipped employee: The median hourly wage for servers was $9.61 in 2016.

Once a practice becomes the norm, it’s easy to forget the discriminatory history and oppressive institutions that set it in motion in the first place. The DOL’s proposed tip-stealing rule could add yet another chapter to tipping’s long, unjust history.

Compiling a comprehensive list of Donald Trump’s lies, norm-flouting acts, and other abuses of power during his first year in office is no small task. But two watchdog organizations dedicated to upholding integrity in American government have taken up the challenge.

“The Art of the Lie,” a report published Monday by Common Cause and Democracy 21, slots the Trump administration’s indiscretions into 20 categories, ranging in scope from “Trump’s Attacks on the Judiciary” to “Keeping White House Visitor Logs Secret.” The study paints a picture of an administration operating with unprecedented opaqueness and disregard for America’s democratic norms.

Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn and Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer note, “Given the chaotic and erratic nature of President Trump and his administration, it is easy for Americans to become overwhelmed. Some of Trump’s wrongful actions have been high-profile; others are more subtle.”

Trump’s “high-profile” actions are old hat by now: He has uttered “more than 2,100 lies, false or misleading statements, and untruths in his first year.” He continues to wage open war against the press; denounces the entire judicial system as “broken and unfair” when the courts issue decisions he personally dislikes, and still has not released his tax returns.

But Trump’s subtler actions demonstrate the more pernicious ways the president has undermined government integrity. While attacks on the Census Bureau have so far not shown up in Trump’s bombastic tweets, the groups warn that “recent decisions by the Trump administration risk making the 2020 Census grossly inaccurate.”

The groups argue that the 2018 budget request for the bureau is “woefully inadequate” and condemn Trump’s expected appointment of Thomas Brunell, an ardent proponent of racial gerrymandering, as the bureau’s deputy director—and the federal official charged with overseeing the 2020 survey. These moves will have far-reaching effects, as the decennial count is the basis for congressional and state legislative redistricting—as well as nearly $600 billion in annual government spending.

The damaging consequences of a cabinet currently overseeing an intentional hollowing-out of the federal bureaucracy, and whose secretaries are often hostile to the fundamental missions of the agencies they head, also raise major concerns: “The Trump administration has failed to fill an unprecedented number of critical positions throughout the federal government [which] leads to dysfunction and wasted government resources as policies await direction.” The authors highlight the dramatic staff cuts taking place at Rex Tillerson’s State Department—a “national emergency,” according to former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

Elsewhere, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who sued the federal agency numerous times as attorney general of Oklahoma, has dismissed hundreds of EPA employees, as has Betsy Devos at the Department of Education. And at Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, the report includes this telling quote from a career HUD employee: “No agenda, nothing to move forward or push back against. Just nothing.”

Many of President Trump’s missteps have been widely covered. But as “The Art of the Lie” cautions, the American public must remain vigilant about the serious consequences of the administration’s lesser known actions and about the equally damaging consequences of deciding to take no action at all.

The first jobs report of 2018 is out, and overall the news is pretty good. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans will certainly try to take credit for the job growth and higher wages. But it would be more accurate to attribute this uptick to state labor policy—not the superiority of MAGAnomics and massive tax cuts.

The United States added 200,000 jobs in January, making this the 88th straight month of job growth, and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 percent (though the black unemployment rate jumped back up to 7.7 percent, just days after Trump boasted about historically low rates in his State of the Union). Meanwhile, average hourly earnings for private-sector workers increased by 0.34 percent this month, and 2.9 percent over the past year.

Wage levels have struggled to gain traction in recent years, even as the labor market has tightened. But for labor economists and workers alike, these most recent increases could be a sign that wages might finally be on the upswing, thanks to progressive state policies. In the new year, 18 states across the country—from Florida to Maine, and from Washington state to Michigan—hiked their minimum wages, bringing $5 billion in additional pay to 4.5 million workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Despite staunch resistance from Republicans and the business lobby, worker-led movements like the Fight for 15 have had a great deal of success in increasing pressure on state and municipal lawmakers to increase minimum pay. The results are now evident in jobs reports, and it’s pretty clear that one of the best ways for the Trump administration to boost pay is to push for a higher minimum wage.

As today's jobs report shows, if Trump really wanted to goose wages, he'd raise the national minimum wage to like $10 an hour.

But will Trump and congressional Republicans finally come to accept minimum-wage increases as sound economic policy? Don’t count on it. The federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour, hasn’t gone up since 2009, and its value has only withered since. The issue has become highly polarized in Congress, with Republicans doubling down on the argument that any increase to the federal minimum wage will kill jobs and hurt business, and that the only way for wages to go up is to ease taxes on corporations and let it all trickle down.

The new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, will announce today that Indiana will follow Kentucky's lead and receive approval to implement work requirements in the state’s Medicaid program, according to a Politico report. Last month, the Trump administration signaled they’d allow requiring work for low-income people seeking health-care assistance, and Kentucky quickly became the first state to receive the greenlight to radically change their Medicaid model.

Indiana actually inspired some parts of Kentucky’s plan, as the state has included aspects of “consumer-driven” health insurance, like premium payments, in its Medicaid program since 2015. Data show that 25,000 Medicaid recipients were dropped from Indiana’s Medicaid program between 2015 and 2017 for failing to pay their premiums.

Now, like Kentucky, Indiana will be adding work requirements to the mix.

But not so fast. Three organizations have brought a lawsuit against the state of Kentucky on behalf of 15 Kentucky Medicaid recipients, alleging that forcing Medicaid recipients to work to continue receiving health care is a violation of federal law. The Kentucky Equal Justice Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the National Health Law Program are arguing that the Trump administration’s willingness to allow work requirements and their approval of Kentucky’s plan to restructure Medicaid “are unauthorized attempts to re-write the Medicaid Act.” As I reported in September, nearly 100,000 Kentuckians are expected to lose Medicaid as a result of the approval to change the state’s program.

The Obama administration resisted allowing work requirements in Medicaid, reasoning that such requirements, which would reduce coverage, were inconsistent with the purpose of the program: to provide health care to low-income people.

As more states add a work requirement to Medicaid receipt, the benefits of Medicaid expansion (more people accessing preventive care and folks getting healthier) will begin to erode. While states with conservative governors may be willing to expand Medicaid if it means they can require poor people to work, this would be a Pyrrhic victory for the left: Work requirements mean that the neediest people won’t receive care, and they reinforce the idea that assistance should be given only to (a harmful assumption of) who is most “deserving.”

Under pressure from Major League Baseball, the Cleveland Indians announced this week that beginning in 2019, they’ll retire the Chief Wahoo mascot—the cartoonish, red-faced figure that’s meant to depict a Native American chief—but only from on-field team uniforms.

“We have consistently maintained that we are cognizant and sensitive to both sides of the discussion,” said Paul Dolan, the owner of the team. And in fact, they are trying to please “both sides” by retiring Wahoo on the field, but not from merchandise sold by the Indians organization, allowing it to keep profiting from the logo.

Opponents argue that these depictions “honor” Native Americans, but studies have shown that stereotype-based mascots and related imagery in sports have real, damaging psychological and social consequences for Native Americans—and they especially impact the development and self-esteem of Native youth.

In a statement, MLB, which will no longer be selling Wahoo apparel in its official shop, said the mascot “was no longer appropriate.” Was it ever? Native Americans have been calling for the removal of Wahoo for decades, most recently with the #NotYourMascot campaign. And while this move is a step in the right direction, activists were quick to point out that the team name itself needs changing, too. (There’s a movement in Cleveland to change the name to the Spiders, the name of the city’s baseball team in the late 1800s.)

There’s a certain football team that I’ll only call “the Washington team” that might want to revisit its branding next.

In December, President Trump’s Department of Labor announced that it would roll back an Obama-era rule that limited when tipped restaurant workers would have to share their tips with other employees.

Worker advocates warned that undoing the rule would allow employers to use tips from waiters and bar staff to subsidize the low wages of employees in the kitchen—and that ultimately management could simply keep the tips for themselves. When Trump’s Labor Department proposed its new “tip pooling” rule, which was a top priority for the restaurant industry, it claimed that it couldn’t measure how it would affect workers’ wages.

However, Bloomberg Law now reports that an internal DOL analysis found that workers “could lose out on billions of dollars in gratuities.” But Trump officials tried to alter that analysis and ultimately buried the information entirely.

As the report finds:

Senior department political officials—faced with a government analysis showing that workers could lose billions of dollars in tips as a result of the proposal—ordered staff to revise the data methodology to lessen the expected impact, several of the sources said.

And even when that new methodology seemed to show that tipped workers would lose less money, administration officials remained uneasy. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and his team took issue with the DOL’s assumption that managers could simply keep the pooled tips instead of dividing it among the staff as a whole. Ultimately, the DOL and the White House agreed to remove the data entirely.

So just how much did the DOL find the rule would cost workers? It’s unclear. But the Economic Policy Institute came up with an estimate that found that the new tip pooling rule could prompt employers to pocket as much as $5.8 billion in tips earned by restaurant workers each year.

“This shows the lengths to which the Trump administration and Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta will go to hide the fact that they are taking steps to actively make workers’ lives worse,” Heidi Shierholz, EPI’s senior economist and a former chief economist for Obama’s DOL, said in a statement.

This is just the latest example of how Trump’s Labor Department has become a vehicle for advancing business-friendly deregulation at the expense of workers’ own welfare.

President Donald Trump—the great dealmaker—has an ego fueled by flattery, which is allowing corporate America to play him like a fiddle. Since the passage of his massive tax cuts, Trump has trumpeted the news of one-time bonuses, wage hikes, capital investment projects, and job creation promises as affirmations of his genius.

His State of the Union Address Wednesday night was no different. As Trump proclaimed:

Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax-cut bonuses—many of them thousands and thousands of dollars per worker, and it’s getting more, every month, every week. Apple has just announced it plans to invest a total of $350 billion in America, and hire another 20,000 workers. And just a little while ago, Exxon Mobil announced a $50 billion investment in the United States. Just a little while ago.

This, in fact, is our new American moment. There has never been a better time to start living the American Dream.

So what about that ExxonMobil investment? ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, who took over for Rex Tillerson when he went to work for Trump, announced Monday that the company would be investing $50 billion in capital and exploration investments over the next five years—a move, he said, that is thanks in part to the corporate tax cuts. Trump repeated the news in his address to much applause, as Tillerson looked on from the front row.

It turns out the fossil fuel giant was, in all likelihood, going to make that investment anyway. As Americans for Tax Fairness point out, SEC filings show that ExxonMobil made about $53 billion in domestic investment in the five-year period between 2012-2016. This suggests that the company will continue to invest in capital spending at a similar (or even lower) pace.

The company was already paying an absurdly low rate in corporate taxes—just 13.6 percent on $60 billion in U.S. profits between 2008-2015. Lowering the statutory rate to 21 percent, then, doesn’t do much for its after-tax profits.

Of course, ExxonMobil is an incredibly powerful corporate actor—the third largest company in the world. It has a tremendous interest in currying favor with its regulator, the Trump administration. Trump’s presidency could prove highly lucrative for the company, enhancing prospects for drilling along the U.S. coasts, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and potential for new fracking operations on public land.

It’s also absurd to assert that news of these bonuses is anything more than savvy public relations. And that money that Apple is “bringing back” from overseas is merely an accounting move on paper—and an affirmation that it was evading U.S. taxation by shifting its income into foreign accounts. Apple’s move is not any sort of tribute to the brilliance of Trump’s deal making on taxes.

Corporations like ExxonMobil and Apple will continue to misrepresent their typical business operations as all due to the brilliance of Trump. The flattery will work. But that does not mean the Trump tax cuts are working.

Democrats do get excited over Republican retirements. As things stand now in New Jersey, full of people incensed by President Trump and recently departed GOP Governor Chris Christie, the 11th Congressional District, a longtime Republican stronghold, may turn blue in the fall.

But for commuters and travelers wanting to get from New Jersey to New York, it’s tough to be completely enthused about the departure of Republican House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, who this week announced he wouldn’t run for re-election in New Jersey’s 11th.

Even with more conservative Republicans accusing Frelinghuysen of flirting with earmarks, the 12-term Republican somehow managed to secure hundreds of millions in funding for the Gateway Program—the $30 billion infrastructure project to replace and upgrade the 19th century cross-Hudson antiques that currently connect the two states.

Doing away with earmarks seemed a good idea to Republicans and some pliable Democrats back in the sands of time (2010 to be exact). But living without earmarks—a convention that forced members of Congress to give in order to get—has pretty much turned the body into a hornets’ nest of aging Republicans refighting sectional battles: sticking it to the so-called coastal elites and steering funds that could build tunnels and bridges between New Jersey and New York (and more than a few other places) into tax cuts for their campaign donors.

Frelinghuysen may have violated Republican orthodoxy by working with Democrats to secure funding for the tunnels and voting against the GOP tax plan (which clearly penalized his New Jersey constituents). But one of the wealthiest men in Congress went wobbly on the Affordable Care Act, which he voted to repeal (despite his initial opposition to the repeal-and-replace effort); earned his constituents’ wrath for not holding town hall meetings; and sparked NJ 11th for Change, a fired-up grassroots movement dedicated to throwing him out of Congress.

In the end, he couldn’t deliver for the Hudson tunnels, either. At the end of December, Frelinghuysen got royally screwed over by the president, who elected not to support the Obama administration’s Gateway funding program after all. It will likely require a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress—which might well include a Democratic successor to Frelinghuysen—to come up with the funds for the tunnels.

The seat has been in the hands of Republican since 1985, and Hillary Clinton lost the district by only one percentage point in 2016. The 11th Congressional District, a wealthy, moderate, suburban area outside New York City, could be a good get for the blue team this fall: Already two Democratic women are in the race to succeed Frelinghuysen.